Dreams of the Past:
Fleetwood Mac’s Digital Renaissance and the Haunting of Countercultural Ideals
Graduate Research Presentation at San Diego State University
(April 17, 2025)
In 2020, a viral TikTok known as the “Dreams Skateboarding Video” propelled the band Fleetwood Mac back into the cultural spotlight. Nathan Apodaca, under the username 420DoggFace208, posted a video of himself skateboarding alongside a freeway, sipping Ocean Spray cranberry juice, and lip-syncing to Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 hit “Dreams.” Within two weeks of its release, the video had garnered over 35 million views and 13 million likes on TikTok, sparking a wave of recreations. “Dreams” reentered the Billboard Hot 100 more than 40 years after its original release. This moment was not an isolated resurgence, but part of a broader revival that musicologist Nate Sloan has dubbed the “Macaissance.” Over the past decade, Fleetwood Mac’s music has repeatedly resurfaced through memes, advertisements, and viral content. Given that their songs were once dismissed as middle-of-the-road soft rock, their renewed cultural relevance raises important questions: Why does the sound, aesthetic, and ethos of 1970s Fleetwood Mac continue to resonate so deeply with contemporary audiences?
My project explores this question by examining the historical, cultural, and musical dimensions of Fleetwood Mac’s resurgence in digital media. The “Dreams Skateboarding Video” draws from a longer lineage of cultural resistance. Using Mark Fisher’s theory of hauntology, I argue that the video evokes a longing for unrealized futures rooted in the lost promises of the 1960s and 1970s. The video’s aesthetic recalls the era’s radical ideals of freedom, peace, and rebellion, which continue to echo beneath the surface of contemporary consumer culture. The commodification of Fleetwood Mac’s music illustrates how their work operates within this "haunted" space, where the ideals of the counterculture are invoked but not fully engaged in the present. This argument is further informed by Henry Jenkins’s concept of participatory culture, which describes how digital audiences actively shape and circulate media content. Fleetwood Mac’s resurgence is not merely a passive return to earlier music but an active reinterpretation shaped by affect, memory, and nostalgia.
By situating Fleetwood Mac’s music in both its original and contemporary contexts, my analysis draws on Fisher’s theory of Acid Communism to contend that the countercultural ideals of the 1960s were not discarded but suppressed by neoliberal capitalism. Fisher viewed this period as an unfinished project whose revolutionary potential remains buried in cultural memory. Applying this framework allows for a re-engagement with the political and aesthetic dimensions of Fleetwood Mac’s work that have often been obscured through commodification. As digital media platforms and viral trends bring music from previous eras back into public consciousness, Fleetwood Mac’s renewed popularity reflects a broader cultural longing to reconnect with the radical ideals of the 1960s counterculture. Through an analysis of the band’s earlier work, evolving musical styles, and subsequent resurgence in viral media, this research shows how these trends offer a pathway to reclaiming (or "unforgetting") the transformative potential of countercultural ideals.
